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WOWY Analysis of Umberger for Hartnell trade

More often than not the first thing I look at when I want to evaluate a player is their WOWY stats to see if the player boosts the performance of their teammates or suppress it when he is on the ice. Let’s take a look at a WOWY comparision of Umberger and Hartnell starting with some links to their WOWY pages.

When on any of those pages you can click “Visualize this table” to get some charts that I find are often a quick way of getting an overview of the player in question. For example, here is a CF% WOWY chart for Hartnell from last year.

In these charts it is better to have bubbles below and to the right of the one-to-one diagonal line from that runs from the lower left to the upper right. For Hartnell in 2013-14 every single teammate was the the lower right of this diagonal line which is really good. Not a lot of players have charts this nice. If you go back and look at previous years you will see that Hartnell has accomplished this relatively consistently. This is a good thing. Now let’s take a look at Umberger’s.

That is a much less impressive chart as the majority of Umberger’s team mates have performed better when not playing with him. This is not good and yet is is fairly typical for Umberger to have WOWY charts that look like this.

This is a table of how Umberger’s line mates performed with and without Umberger last season. Listed are all forwards who played at least 100 minutes of 5v5 ice time with Umberger.

Line mate

With Umberger

Without Umberger

Ryan Johansen

50.2%

50.8%

Nick Foligno

50.4%

52.0%

Artem Anisimov

40.1%

53.3%

Blake Comeau

46.1%

54.6%

Mark Letestu

42.8%

52.1%

And now for Hartnell’s line mates who played at least 100 minutes with Hartnell last year.

Line mate

With Hartnell

Without Hartnell

Claude Giroux

55.7%

49.5%

Jakub Voracek

57.1%

52.5%

Brayden Schenn

51.9%

46.3%

Wayne Simmonds

53.9%

46.3%

Again, you can go back to previous seasons and the general trend for the two players is pretty much the same. Players perform worse when playing with Umberger than when not and players perform better when playing with Hartnell than when not.

From a WOWY perspective, Umberger is a below average player and Hartnell is an above average player. In fact there aren’t many players that have WOWY charts that look better than Hartnell’s except for the true star players (such as Toews, or Bergeron, or Kopitar, etc.). Hartnell in my opinion is easily a top 6 player. Umberger I am not sure I’d really want on my team in any significant role. With this trade the Blue Jackets get better in two ways. First by adding a good player in Hartnell and second by subtracting a poor player in Umberger (classic case of addition by subtraction).

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Welcome to HockeyAnalysis.com, where I strive to get a better understanding of the game of hockey through the use of statistical analysis. I hope you enjoy whatever time you spend here and maybe even learn a little. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop me an e-mail at david (at) hockeyanalysis.com.